Princeton University Extrasolar Planet Discussion Group

I will present results from the Planet Hunters TESS (PHT) project, which harnesses the power of citizen science to find transit events in the TESS data by engaging tens of thousands of volunteers. To date, PHT volunteers have classified all two-minute cadence TESS data up to sector 34 and discovered over 115 planet candidates that weren’t previously known. Most are long-period planets, but we also identify a wide range of other interesting planet and stellar systems. Our results show that humans can outperform the automated detection pipelines for certain types of transits, especially single (long-period) transits, as well as aperiodic transits (circumbinary planets) and planets around rapidly rotating, active (young systems), or otherwise variable stars. I will give an overview of our detection and vetting process, and show how our findings complement the population of planets identified by automated algorithms. Finally, I will present two of our most recent discoveries, a system of two planets around the bright star HD 152843, which has outstanding prospects for atmospheric characterisation, and a puzzling compact hierarchical triple star system.